Prospero Burns

Prospero Burns by Dan Abnett is the fifteenth installment in the Horus Heresy series. Released as the second part of a duology, it follows up on Graham McNeill's A Thousand Sons by showing the invasion of Prospero from the perspective of the Space Wolves, but is told through the eyes of human storyteller Kasper Ansbach Hawser.

When Black Library decided to produce two books centering on the Battle of Prospero, one each from the perspective of the two Legions involved, they approached their two highest-profile authors to write them: Dan Abnett and Graham McNeill. Abnett is on record as saying he's not a big fan of the Space Wolves and so he was originally slated to pen the Thousand Sons' side of the story, but fate intervened and Graham McNeill took the reins of the Fifteenth Legion instead. The result was the superb A Thousand Sons, one of my personal favourites and the first Heresy novel to make the New York Times bestsellers list, but as both a Dan Abnett and a Thousand Sons megafan I can't help but salivate over what might have been...    

Prospero Burns was written by an author less than in love with its core Legion, but ironically Abnett's ambivalence translates into a beneficial deepening of the Space Wolves' culture. Abnett endows the otherwise two-dimensional Legion with a greater sense of self-awareness than they have been granted before, and his choice to ground the novel in a human perspective, seemingly driven by a dislike for the Astartes themselves, allows them plenty of chances to explain their subtler side to the protagonist, though those who come to the novel hankering for some barbarians in power armour ripping out alien spines won't be disappointed. Kasper Ansbach Hawser arrives on Fenris an old man at the end of his career, seeking out the Space Wolves out of academic curiosity, and is promptly shot down. The novel's opening passages as the human tribes of Fenris battle over Hawser's fate are some of the best in the book, and the arrival of the story's first Space Marine sprinting across a frozen ocean at the head of a storm has to go down as one of the best character introductions in Heresy history.

As the rest of the story pans out Hawser joins the Space Wolves as a skjald, memorising and reciting their stories as he accompanies them on the Great Crusade. Hawser's past is given a lot of attention through frequent flashbacks; the novel is just as much about him as it is about the Space Wolves, and it is more about either than it is about the Battle of Prospero. Abnett's prose is masterful, rich in detail and sensation without ever seeming heavy or slow, but the plot revolves around things immaterial much more than your standard Heresy novel as it slowly comes to light that the Wolves believe Hawser is psychically imprinted spy sent by the Thousand Sons. The hand of Chaos in the suspicions between the Legions is only revealed at the very end, and the vast majority of the Battle of Prospero is skipped in favour of resolving this plot thread. The novel ends on a typically ambiguous but powerful note, closing a rich but left-of-field chapter in the Heresy series.